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Anxiety, Play and Performance: Malte and the [post]modern
Author(s) -
Yarrow Ralph
Publication year - 1994
Publication title -
orbis litterarum
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.109
H-Index - 8
eISSN - 1600-0730
pISSN - 0105-7510
DOI - 10.1111/j.1600-0730.1994.tb00055.x
Subject(s) - performative utterance , narrative , parallels , postmodernism , modernism (music) , performativity , consciousness , order (exchange) , aesthetics , psychology , art , literature , epistemology , philosophy , mechanical engineering , finance , engineering , economics
This article starts from a suggestion by Richard Sheppard that “anxiety” may be a more appropriate response to the situation of Modernism than Postmodernism's tendency to the ludic. In order to attempt to balance the two, it looks at Rilke's Malte Laurids Brigge and proposes: (i) that it can usefully be seen as a text in which the narrative becomes performative; (ii) that some considerations of processes in performance training offer useful parallels; (iii) that a dynamic model of consciousness is necessary to contextualize this; (iv) that Malte needs to be read through a ‘matrix’or pluralist approach which can only fully occur on the basis of the model in (iii); and (v) that combining all these perspectives enables a view of writing and reception through Malte in which “anxiety” and “play” can figure as complementary stages of the activity of production.